Michael and Phyllis Suber recycle organic waste in their Princeton Township home on Thursday, November 29.Martin Griff / The Times of Trenton

PRINCETON — Janet Pellichero hasn’t put on a vegetable costume yet, but she admits she spends plenty of time thinking up ways to promote the town’s curbside organic waste pickup program, the first in New Jersey.

“I still wake up at night and think about what more can I do, short of knocking on everyone’s door and saying, ‘Do this,’” said Pellichero, the town’s recycling coordinator. “I could dress up as a tomato. Don’t think I haven’t thought of that.”

Now in its third year after being renewed by the consolidated Princeton, the program has continued to grow from 450 participants last year to about 570 now, Pellichero said.

She hopes to attract closer to 650 memberships, once more old members who participated before consolidation sign back up, and to show that the program deserves to be continued and expanded further, she said.

“We’ve had over 200 new people sign up in the past month and a half, so that’s pretty darn encouraging,” she said. “It’s just taking a little bit longer than expected.”

The program offers curbside pickup of waste such as fish bones, pizza crusts, hair, vegetable scraps and other organics, which are hauled to a composting center in Delaware. Sign-ups have surged since January, when the town council approved a $65 membership fee and capped participation at 1,000 members.

Hiccups in the pickup service and in disseminating information to potential new subscribers may have slowed its growth, Pellichero said, but Sustainable Princeton has helped the town develop a marketing plan for the service, with a logo and a recognizable brand.

“People see the carts on the street. It’s something different from everything else,” she said. “The bins are a good way to get attention out there. People call and ask what it was.”

Pellichero said the program saves the town money, because disposing of trash in Mercer County costs $125 per ton but sending the food waste out of state costs only $46 per ton. Some skeptics have said to her that sending a garbage truck to Delaware weekly generates harmful carbon emissions, but she argued that local garbage is not necessarily being dealt with in-state either, she said.

And the program’s larger goal is to ramp up interest sufficiently to support the opening of a composting facility in New Jersey, rather than exporting the waste, she said.

Pellichero said she knows other towns are interested: She has gotten inquiries from several municipalities, including Highland Park, Hoboken, Hopewell, Lambertville, Lawrence and Pennington, she said. Other towns have reached out to the nonprofit Sustainable Jersey, though none has agreed yet to start collecting organics, co-director Randall Solomon said.

“It is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. It’s not as economically viable and lucrative because there is no plant in New Jersey,” he said. “There is no plant, because there is no stream.”

To make larger scale operations happen, some towns must be willing to pioneer these sorts of programs, he said.

“When you look at sustainability, food waste is one of the biggest issues. It is a big untapped resource that we have yet to be able to reclaim or mitigate,” Solomon said. “I have no doubt that if we get enough municipalities, we could get a plant in New Jersey.”

Princeton has a two-year contract with Premier Food Waste Recycling, a division of Central Jersey Waste and Recycling. The company has said it can pick up from as many households as needed, but the town has set a cap of 1,000 households through 2014.

The prospects after that point are up in the air, Pellichero said. The town has the option of extending the contract further, but it depends on the number of households who sign up by the end of next year.

Pellichero said she does not know yet if the program will grow quickly enough to allow further expansion.

“I never want to get too confident. I never want to feel like it’s there, until it’s there,” she said. “It’s going to be a long 18 months.”